This year marks the 30th anniversary of the world wide web, which began in 1989. This was the same year as the first commercial public use of the internet. I remember when all web addresses I saw began with www, but this is actually just a subdomain. I would like to begin with a list of things the web is not:
The web is not the whole internet
The web is just one part of the internet. Email also goes between parties over the internet, but not the web. Although the first commercial public use of the internet was the same year as the web began, the only commercial public use at that time was emails between clients of different online service providers. Email existed before then, but one could only send email to other clients of the same service.
It has only been 27 years since the web has been available to the general public.
The web is not American
As noted before, the internet is of American origins, and as are a lot of things to do with computers and the internet, even the free software movement and open content licences originated in that country, but the web was founded by a Brit, Tim Berners-Lee when he worked for Switzerland's C.E.R.N, cern.ch is the oldest domain name. Does that mean that .ch is actually the oldest top-level domain?